Asset Inventory and Asset Management Plan Updating – How Often?

Inventory or asset register for small utilities could be done once a year.

Knowing the frequency of updating asset inventory and asset management plan is important, whether or not you’re managing smaller utilities.

Ross opined that once the original inventory has been made, things don’t change quickly. Unless you’re replacing some assets, in which case you know about it, or you’re adding a new area, he added.

Ross continues:

For bigger authorities, you’ve always got stuff going on because there’s always renewals or development going on or whatever in bigger cities and towns.

But in a very small systems, if it’s stable, once you’ve built the inventory, maybe you’re only going to just do a check once a year. And just go observe, “Hey, was there anything that changed?”

The things that could catch you are like if you swapped a pump and put a new pump in or something like that, then you might want to update your inventory and asset management plan. The people would know the changes and updating isn’t something you are going to sit down in that case and do every month or every week.

Whereas, my recommendation for a larger or mid to larger-sized utilities is that you do your additions and deletions monthly because then you’d nail the process and you start on top of it.

We’ve had terrible problems in New Zealand – people leaving inventory updates a year to three years and then everybody forgets what happened.

And it takes a long time to scramble around and find all the capital works projects and make sure you’ve got them all, and their renewal projects and any of the mechanical large maintenance, where you swap pumps out or screens out or whatever.

I think monthly is the ideal. It’s doing something every month. You have to nail the process, and once you’ve done that then it will flow quite smoothly.

But with a very small, very stable system, inventory asset register condition – a condition could even be once every two or three to five years.

The inventory or the asset register – maybe just do a check once a year to say, “Hey what’s changed?” And stay on top of it.